Roundabout man whirls into jazz. (Jazz).

Francis Dreyfus is a snowy-haired man with tales as long as winter evenings. The boss of Dreyfus Jazz, one of France's most respected indies whose roster includes such fine artists as Ahmad Jamal, Marcus Miller, Jean-Michel Pilc, Sylvain Luc and Birelli Lagreene, has, since 1963, trodden a path full of brilliant anecdotal twists. That was the year he started his own company publishing well-known French pop acts. Another one of his accounts was a children's TV series that would become the stuff of legend.

"The Magic Roundabout made a big impression on a lot of the journalists I meet around the world, so they have a lot of respect for me," says Dreyfus.

"I realised I was a little bit of a hero but I didn't quite know why. Actually it was the fact that everybody thought when Dougal spoke, with his accent, that he was stoned. Maybe that was the time when the parents were even more stoned than the kids. But it turned out to be my calling card ... the guy who did The Magic Roundabout."

Dreyfus went on to become what he calls "a travel agent for English groups," publishing the music of Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Cat Stevens and T-Rex in France. Huge success with Jean Michel Jarre followed, but jazz was always close to Dreyfus' heart.

He discovered bebop when he was eight years old and, by the time he was 15, he was running backroom jazz clubs. Inspired by famous promoters such as Norman Granz, Dreyfus harboured an ambition to go into jazz, but it wasn't until the early Nineties that he decided to realise it.

"The reason I started a jazz label is because I wasn't buying records any more," he says. "I loved Charlie Parker and Monk but I'm not gonna stop at Bill Evans forever. The most important thing is to realise that jazz isn't a fashion. It's a living language with specific parameters."

Dreyfus's primary goal was to find the musicians to form the "world's most beautiful band", until he realised they already existed under the name of the Mingus Big Band. After signing them in the early Nineties, Dreyfus began to focus on individual artists. US ...